Fahrenheit 451

A plain cover, the title in orange and black, something like the forks of a flame. If you squint. Jacket trapped in durable plastic, folded into sharp corners. Hardcover. The paper thicker than that of popular fiction so you can only see the type on the back page by holding it up to the light. Smells like painted and peeling concrete, water somersaulting from a fountain, green green green (artificially so especially in this heat wave says my conscience, as sprinklers spit and then spray, but then I doubt the paper is made of recycled paper).

I really enjoyed reading Fahrenheit 451. Or I really enjoyed the experience of Fahrenheit 451. Or both. Or my senses really enjoyed the physical book. Or all or maybe none. Have I left anything out, you? Maybe I enjoyed the unexpected intellectualisings - the subtexts to the subtexts to the subtexts. Which is all philosophy is really - layers and circles - but then so is life. And on we skip.

I took the book out of the library (no, you don't get diseases from handling the books (and you germaphobes will be the end of human race, I swear it) and whoop the library is closed until mid-March for renovations so I am less likely to get a fine). Which explains the cover and the paper but not the smell - note the smell of a book is as important a criterion as the first paragraph of said book, but in this case the smell is that of where I was when I read the book. In case you missed that plot twist.

Without conceding that lists have any value on the internet beyond helping bored employees look busy, I may have searched for two sets of valuable information (a set, and not a list, having value, you): best dystopian fiction and best fiction of the previous century. I may have found Fahrenheit 451 on both lists - sets - so whether or not I enjoyed the book or the book or the experience or the thinking, other people think it's grand too.

The book is set in an America where people have lost interest in, well, thinking, and have succumbed to the lullabies of popular media. Years earlier, books were piled in corners until the local government just banned the piles and started setting fire to them. Now, our protagonist's job is to burn them. He likes his job so much he can describe the way paper burns, in detail. Like a serial killer recounting his crimes.

As in most dystopian novels, the more shallow the characters seem, the more secrets they keep in their depths. And to be honest, most of the characters seem shallow as a puddle in the beginning. In the middle, so does the plot. But both carry what were then and are again fashionable ideas, and ping pong them around until the ideas get lost in the bushes. Where presumably future writers are meant to find them or bury them or make them into bobble heads.

I was set in a courtyard in a garden. See lyrical prose above. My mind was set, is set, in the body of a superhero whose skin is made of rubber. (I could erase pencil markings with my finger alone, imagine!) In other words, I prefer to think (and read) than do. The circling makes me dizzy but that makes it easier to ignore the dystopian reality that the here and now is.

The future of Fahrenheit 451 was possible but didn't happen, as much as people in my industry cry that books might as well be burnt because no one even bothers to put them in piles anymore. (Drama queens...) Instead, the media have spawned sub-groups upon sub-groups upon sub-groups. Everyone is carved into niche segments with products targeted like rifle lasers on them. Everyone reads although they may not know it.

But I don't think the probability, nevermind possibility, of that future was meant to be much deeper than the characters or plot. (The novel is short, too, which helps.) Let's assume you are unique literally in terms of genes (nature) and experience (nurture), but not in terms of your biology. Some of your behaviour is shortwired. Sorry, but you were set up. Like the men and women in the novel who sit in their living rooms staring at their walls which are now holograms.

What behaviour, you cry. What behaviour is shortwired?

Hush now. Do you have earrings? A tattoo? Do you wear your socks up or rolled down? Is your hair short or long? You were set up to be belong somewhere, to be a social animal, to wallpaper your mind with identical patterns. Or something. Read the book. After you finish reading this blog.

My experience of the book is unique, right: A 30-year-old hardcover, identified through a web search, loaned from the library, read in a courtyard in the sun, by someone lives in a slightly askew mind. But how differently would I behave if raised in the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451? Even if I thought differently? How odd that I didn't connect this with another earlier novel. But I'm not going to give the game away. I'm sure you can find the answer in a review, but I'm giving you a chance to be unique.